Why Comedy Is Truer to Life Than Tragedy

By

Terry Teachout

Aug. 30, 2012 5:50 p.m. ET

Of all the great tragedies, Shakespeare's "King Lear" seems to me to be the very greatest. I went to a very fine production of "Lear" the other day, and was impressed all over again ]by the play's incomparable richness and beauty. Yet all things being equal, I'd almost always choose to see a comedy like "Twelfth Night" or "Much Ado About Nothing" instead. It's not that I don't love "Lear." I do, passionately. But as I grow older, I grow more firmly convinced that comedy is truer to life than tragedy, not just onstage but in all the narrative art forms.

This isn't to say that the tragic vision of life is false. I've sat through more than enough funerals to have figured that out. "Shaksbeer is passimist because is de life passimist also!" So said Hyman Kaplan, the first-generation immigrant whose struggles with the English language were wittily portrayed by Leo Rosten in "The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N." But I've spent enough time chuckling at the unintended absurdities of those very same funerals to know that in most human lives, absurdity and sorrow are woven together too tightly to be teased apart—and it is comedy, not tragedy, that illustrates that fact most fully. Life is too complex to be painted solely in shades of black. Even Shakespeare made room in "Lear" for the Fool, who makes us all laugh by saying out loud what poor old King Lear fears in his heart of hearts—that he, too, has been a fool, and will shortly pay the ultimate price for his foolishness.

ENLARGE

Carl Wiens

Neil Simon, the most popular American playwright of the 20th century, eventually came to the same conclusion, though he got there through the back door. Having spent the first part of his career churning out knock-'em-dead farces like "The Odd Couple," he changed his tune in the 1970s and started to write what he called "serious comedies." "I used to ask, 'What is a funny situation?'" he said at the time. "Now I ask, 'What is a sad situation and how can I tell it humorously?'" For a long time I thought that his plays were nothing more than stand-up routines writ large, but after I saw the TACT/The Actors Company's off-Broadway revival of "Lost in Yonkers" in March, I understood that a director who stages Mr. Simon's best comedies for truth, not laughs, can make you feel the pain that sets them in motion.

Needless to say, Mr. Simon didn't invent "serious comedy." Shakespeare and Chekhov, among others, preceded him, and Alan Ayckbourn started working in a similar vein around the same time as the author of "The Odd Couple." Moreover, it's a truism of long standing that comedy and tragedy are opposite sides of the same thin coin. As Mel Brooks said, "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."

With all due respect to Messrs. Brooks and Simon, though, it was Donald Francis Tovey, the noted English musicologist, who best explained why comedy has the potential to express more fully than tragedy the fundamental truths of life. In an essay about Mozart, Mr. Tovey pointed out that the language of such "tragic" masterpieces as the G Minor Symphony is derived from the rush and bustle of 18th-century opera buffa, abstracted to the point of sublimity but still fundamentally comic. Listen to that dark and desperate symphony after coming home from a performance of "The Marriage of Figaro" and you'll see at once what he meant.

How can such a thing be? Here's how Mr. Tovey explained it: "Comedy uses the language of real life; and people in real life often find the language of comedy the only dignified expression for their deepest feelings." When I first read that sentence, it felt as though someone had switched on the lights in a musty basement. Yes, "King Lear" is charged with universal feelings—but it isn't real. Not only is it set in a far-off fairyland of kings and queens, but it ends, like most of Shakespeare's tragedies, with a mile-high stack of corpses, a horrific spectacle that precious few of us have had the misfortune to behold.

Because Shakespeare was a genius, he was capable of making us sympathize with Lear and his regal travails. If, on the other hand, the hapless hero of a comedy should trip over a rake, fracture his pelvis and bring the house down, we don't have any trouble identifying with his preposterous plight. We've all been there, more or less, and when it happens to us, we typically express our dismay not in iambic pentameter but in a fusillade of four-letter words.

I hope I see "King Lear" a hundred more times before I die. But "Twelfth Night" is closer to my heart, and always will be. Like the mordantly comic novels of Evelyn Waugh or the melancholy musicals of Stephen Sondheim—or the G Minor Symphony—it tells the truth about life with the wriest and most rueful of smiles. That's the way it ought to be told.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, writes "Sightings" every other Friday. He is the author of "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong." Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

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